just a comment on something the "Floating point precision" inset, which goes: "This is related to .... 0.3333333."

While the author probably knows what they are talking about, this loss of precision has nothing to do with decimal notation, it has to do with representation as a floating-point binary in a finite register, such as while 0.8 terminates in decimal, it is the repeating 0.110011001100... in binary, which is truncated. 0.1 and 0.7 are also non-terminating in binary, so they are also truncated, and the sum of these truncated numbers does not add up to the truncated binary representation of 0.8 (which is why (floor)(0.8*10) yields a different, more intuitive, result). However, since 2 is a factor of 10, any number that terminates in binary also terminates in decimal.

General computing hint: If you're keeping track of money, do yourself and your users the favor of handling everything internally in cents and do as much math as you can in integers. Store values in cents if at all possible. Add and subtract in cents. At every operation that wii involve floats, ask yourself "what will happen in the real world if I get a fraction of a cent here" and if the answer is that this operation will generate a transaction in integer cents, do not try to carry fictional fractional accuracy that will only screw things up later.

I'd like to point out a "feature" of PHP's floating point support that isn't made clear anywhere here, and was driving me insane.

This test (where var_dump says that $a=0.1 and $b=0.1)

if ($a>=$b) echo "blah!";

Will fail in some cases due to hidden precision (standard C problem, that PHP docs make no mention of, so I assumed they had gotten rid of it). I should point out that I originally thought this was an issue with the floats being stored as strings, so I forced them to be floats and they still didn't get evaluated properly (probably 2 different problems there).

To fix, I had to do this horrible kludge (the equivelant of anyway):

if (round($a,3)>=round($b,3)) echo "blah!";

THIS works. Obviously even though var_dump says the variables are identical, and they SHOULD BE identical (started at 0.01 and added 0.001 repeatedly), they're not. There's some hidden precision there that was making me tear my hair out. Perhaps this should be added to the documentation?

Be careful when using float values in strings that are used as code later, for example when generating JavaScript code or SQL statements. The float is actually formatted according to the browser's locale setting, which means that "0.23" will result in "0,23". Imagine something like this:

$x = 0.23;$js = "var foo = doBar($x);";print $js;

This would result in a different result for users with some locales. On most systems, this would print:

var foo = doBar(0.23);

but when for example a user from Germany arrives, it would be different:

var foo = doBar(0,23);

which is obviously a different call to the function. JavaScript won't state an error, additional arguments are discarded without notice, but the function doBar(a) would get 0 as parameter. Similar problems could arise anywhere else (SQL, any string used as code somewhere else). The problem persists, if you use the "." operator instead of evaluating the variable in the string.

So if you REALLY need to be sure to have the string correctly formatted, use number_format() to do it!

But, please don't use your own "functions" to "convert" from float to binary and vice versa. Looping performance in PHP is horrible. Using pack/unpack you use processor's encoding, which is always correct. In C++ you can access the same 32/64 data as either float/double or 32/64 bit integer. No "conversions".

In some cases you may want to get the maximum value for a float without getting "INF".

var_dump(1.8e308); will usually show: float(INF)

I wrote a tiny function that will iterate in order to find the biggest non-infinite float value. It comes with a configurable multiplicator and affine values so you can share more CPU to get a more accurate estimate.

I haven't seen better values with more affine, but well, the possibility is here so if you really thing it's worth the cpu time, just try to affine more.

Best results seems to be with mul=2/affine=1. You can play with the values and see what you get. The good thing is this method will work on any system.

This causes very serious problems in my opinion. In some locale combination the typecasting can be destructive.Maybe when locale decimal separator is ",", then (float)"2,5" should be recognized as "two and a half"? Anyway - bare that in mind and be very careful when casting floats to strings and back.

I was programming an accounting application in MySql that required me to sum a collection of floats and ensure that they equal zero before commiting a transaction, but as seen above a sum of floats cannot always be trusted (as was my case). I kept getting a very small remainder (like 1.4512431231e-14). Since I had used number_format(num,2) to set the precision of the numbers in the database to only two (2) decimal places, when the time comes to calculate the sum I simply multiply every number by ten (10), therby eliminating and decimal places and leaving me with integers to preform my sum. This worked great.

So, if you add two floats, end up with a "special" value, e.g. 1.2E+6, then put that value unmodified into an update query to store the value in a decimal column, say, you will likely get a failed transaction, since the database will see "1.2E+6" as varchar data, not decimal. Likewise, you will likely get an XSD validation error if you put the value into xml.

I have to be honest: this is one of the strangest things I have seen in any language in over 20 years of coding, and it is a colossal pain to work around.

I've just come across this issue with floats when writing a function for pricing. When converting from string to a float, with 2 digits of precision, the issue with comparing floats can pop up and give inconsistent results due to the conversion process.

An easier way rather than relying on the mentioned epsilon method is to use number_format (at least for me as I'll remember it!).

Example function that can return an unexpected result:

if((float)$a == (float)$b) {echo true;} else {echo false;}

echo's false in this example.

Using number format here to trim down the precision (2 point precision being mostly used for currencies etc, although higher precisions should be correctly catered for by number_format), will return an expected result:

The was talk about "converting" 32 and 64 bit IEEE754 binary numbers to PHP float. The issue isn't as much converting, since they are already in binary form, as it is casting. PHP doesn't allow direct accessing of memory, but you can still get around a bit.

<? echo round((69.1-floor(69.1))); ?>This returns 0.1 and is the workaround we use.

Note that<? echo (4.1-floor(4.1)); ?>*does* return 0.1 - so if you, like us, test this with low numbers, you won't, like us, understand why all of a sudden your script stops working, until you spend a lot of time, like us, debugging it.